Singer who has had record-breaking Brit awards success adds to haul thanks to massively ambitious big-band album
Raye is the winner of the 2026 Mercury prize, for her second studio album, This Music May Contain Hope.
Her win – for a hugely ambitious 73-minute record that spanned big band jazz, power balladry, funk and more – caps an ongoing renaissance for a British singer who at one point was in the doldrums, lashing out publicly at her record label for not letting her release a studio album.
Actors in the mix to play 007 in Denis Villeneuve’s installment include Callum Turner and Jack Lowden
The search for the next James Bond may finally be nearing its end: according to reports, a very select group of actors will screen-test to become the next British agent 007 this weekend.
According to the Hollywood Reporter and Variety, citing several sources, a group of actors reportedly including Callum Turner and Slow Horses’ Jack Lowden, will appear in front of cameras as the secret agent this weekend in London.
This was a momentous night in Bournemouth’s history, although the truth is they would have been given a far sterner examination by Coventry or Hull. You can only beat what lies in front of you and Marco Rose’s players never relinquished control against a rotten impersonation of a Milan side. The visitors resembled holograms even before Mike Maignan, their goalkeeper, rendered their task impossible with a deserved sending-off in the first half.
By then Justin Kluivert had given Bournemouth the lead with a penalty and it was another spot-kick from Marcus Tavernier, given after Maignan’s rush of blood, that underlined their overwhelming superiority. Amine Adli applied the garnish with a late free-kick and it meant an abject return to British shores for Ruben Amorim, who would have been excused seeing this particular week as the opportunity to make a point. On this evidence Manchester United, to whom Bournemouth travel on Sunday, share more than a few similarities with the modern version of Milan.
WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR) - De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft Starlink-eigenaar en techmiljardair Elon Musk gebeld en gevraagd om de beperkingen op het Starlink-netwerk in Oekraïne op te heffen. Dit melden Amerikaanse functionarissen aan The Wall Street Journal.
Trump bevestigde donderdag tegen verslaggevers dat Elon Musk de toegang voor Oekraïne tot het Starlink-netwerk had hersteld. Maar hij zei niet of hij met Musk hierover had gesproken.
Eerder op donderdag zei de Oekraïense president Volodymyr Zelensky dat de snelheid van het Starlink-netwerk in Oekraïne niet was hersteld. Zelensky zei dat hij hoopte de komende dagen met de Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Marco Rubio te praten.
Oekraïne meldde vorige week beperkingen in het Starshield-satellietnetwerk, onderdeel van Starlink. De Oekraïense krijgsmacht gebruikt dit satellietinternetnetwerk. Door de beperkingen konden sommige aanvalsdrones en onderscheppingsdrones vrijwel niet gebruikt worden.
Musk en Trump werden door Zelensky beschuldigd deze beperkingen op te hebben gelegd. Beiden bekritiseerden Oekraïne eerder om het aanvallen van Russische raffinaderijen. Musk en Trump ontkenden betrokkenheid.
PARIJS (ANP/AFP) - Op een veiling bij Sotheby's in Parijs is het schilderij Iris van Claude Monet verkocht voor 50 miljoen euro. Het is daarmee het duurste kunstwerk ooit verkocht op een veiling in Frankrijk. De opbrengst werd vooraf geschat tussen de 22 en 30 miljoen euro.
Monet (1840-1926) schilderde het werk, 1,60 meter hoog en 1,80 breed, in 1924 en 1925, in de laatste jaren van zijn leven. Het schilderij komt uit de collectie van de familie Schlumberger en was nog nooit eerder publiekelijk vertoond. Tot voor kort was alleen een zwart-witfoto van het schilderij bekend.
Naast de Iris werden nog drie andere doeken van Monet in de veiling opgenomen, waaronder Saule Pleureur (Treurwilg), met een geschatte waarde van 9 tot 12 miljoen euro.
Bij een veiling van Christie's werden in Parijs ook twee schilderijen van de impressionist verkocht. Bord des falaises à Pourville bracht daar 12,7 miljoen euro op.
Op 5 december is het precies honderd jaar geleden dat Claude Monet overleed.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - De website van de Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP) is weer bereikbaar. Woensdag werd deze offline gehaald als gevolg van kwetsbaarheden in programmeertaal PHP.
Woensdag kwam naar buiten dat PHP, waar veel websites op draaien, een kwetsbaarheid bevatte. Rond 16.00 uur werd daar een oplossing voor beschikbaar gesteld, een zogenoemde 'patch'. Uit voorzorg gingen veel websites die dag offline tot zij de patch konden installeren.
Ook de website van het Centraal Orgaan opvang asielzoekers (COA) is sinds donderdag weer in de lucht. De meeste websites van rijksoverheidsorganisaties waren woensdag wel gewoon bereikbaar.
BBC technology editor Zoe Kleinman likens the recently discovered PHP security vulnerabilities to an unexploded bomb, writing, "The PHP story feels like the cyber equivalent of an unexploded bomb -- I have never seen such a dramatic, public and global response to a cyber event that hasn't happened yet." Although no successful attacks have been confirmed, the AI-assisted discovery of long-hidden flaws has triggered a worldwide security scramble, with websites taken offline as a precaution and administrators racing to deploy patches before attackers can exploit the vulnerabilities. From the report: The weaknesses found in the PHP programming language, which is used by millions of websites, had been quietly resting there for years and are not easy to exploit. One cyber security researcher told me he'd been up all night trying to do it as an experiment, but it was proving very difficult. [...] It was supposed to be kept quiet until everyone had a chance to fix their sites -- but the news was leaked. From that point the clock started ticking.
As I write this, there are no reports that anyone or anything has succeeded in using the flaws to attack a site. "There's a real dilemma," said Prof Alan Woodward from Surrey University. "How do you alert people they need to be ready, and then that a patch is urgently required, whilst not alerting attackers? Basically you're telling everyone about the problem at the same time and hoping the defenders aren't awake enough to act as soon as the patch is out."
But we do know from large web companies like Cloudflare and Palo Alto Networks that millions of attempts have been made. We probably won't know for a while whether it has worked for any criminals, because the companies affected might not be aware yet either. As far as we know the unexploded bomb remains intact for now, and for some experts this is a success. "We've seen how a team of people supported by the large AI company have used AI to find the problem, work for months together to solve it and get everybody ready to be safe and secure," Gina Neff, Professor of Responsible AI at Queen Mary University, told the Today Program on BBC Radio 4. "We have enormous capability to handle these risks."
Researchers have developed a new exploit that shows how even Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) on an x86-64 server cannot stop the PHP2Shell vulnerability. VulnCheck, which made it available to only the company’s Initial Access Intelligence customers, also warned that threat actors are using AI to find even more ways to attack. The team told us that it’s a “significant advance” because up until now, ASLR has been a major barrier to exploiting PHP2Shell on real-world servers. They don't expect that to hold, though. “Adversaries are clearly spending time (and tokens) on this bug,” Spencer McIntyre, director of exploit development at VulnCheck, told The Register. The PHP2Shell mess grew even bigger on Thursday amid reports of attackers abusing the security flaws days before they were disclosed and UK government websites proactively going dark. Vulncheck's exploit targets CVE-2026-109618, a critical, out-of-memory corruption bug that leads to remote code execution (RCE) in PHP, and part of the PHP2Shell pair alongside CVE-2026-109619. The PHP Foundation officially disclosed and issued patches for both on Wednesday. Overnight, VulnCheck researchers developed what they believe is the first known exploit to achieve remote code execution on ASLR-enabled x86-64 systems with PHP's recommended production configuration. ASLR is a built-in defense against memory-corruption bugs – like PHP2Shell – that randomly arranges memory locations of a program's key data areas. By scrambling these components live, in memory every time a program runs, ASLR prevents an attacker trying to achieve RCE from correctly guessing the target memory address – and thus prevents them from executing malicious code. While VulnCheck has seen “hundreds” of PHP2Shell proof-of-concept repositories on GitHub, “very few contain legitimate, working exploits,” McIntyre told us, adding that this is largely due to ASLR. “There's a significant difference between demonstrating a vulnerability and developing an exploit that can overcome the security protections found in real-world environments,” McIntyre said. “One of the biggest obstacles has been ASLR, a protection designed to make memory corruption vulnerabilities much harder to exploit.” The threat hunters’ new technique, we’re told, bypasses ASLR. It uses a confirmed memory leak chained into RCE on PHP 8.4.26, and they claim it works on x86-64 platforms even with ASLR enabled and PHP’s recommended display_errors=off production configuration. “We haven't identified another public or commercial exploit that achieves this under the same conditions,” McIntyre said. “Developing this capability was far from trivial, but it demonstrates that a major barrier to exploiting PHP2Shell on production-configured systems can be overcome.” VulnCheck says it also works on ARM64, but the RCE is not currently functional on ARM-based systems. This should be a wake-up call to all organizations that, especially now in the era of AI bug hunting and exploit development, “the technical difficulty of exploiting a vulnerability shouldn't be confused with protection against it,” McIntyre said. “Organizations running vulnerable versions of PHP should prioritize patching rather than assume existing memory protections or configuration changes will stop an attack.” ®
Researchers have administered AI-designed, bacteria-targeting viruses to a person in what they claim is a first, but don’t press them for results: They’re not ready to say how it went quite yet. Radical Numerics, a San Francisco-based AI lab developing AI models for bioscience, announced the treatment this week, claiming it marks the first time a cocktail containing AI-designed bacteriophages has been administered to a human patient under a compassionate-use arrangement. These aren’t just any viruses, mind you: Omnii-1, the AI model publicly unveiled by Radical Numerics this week, was used to design viable bacteriophages, a type of virus that specifically infects bacteria. Therapeutic use of phages isn’t novel in and of itself, with the bacteria-targeting viruses being sought as an alternative to combat the rise of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria that are increasingly rendering antibiotics ineffective. Phages have a number of potential advantages over antibiotics, most notably their ability to target specific bacterial strains – a big plus when it comes to sparing beneficial gut bacteria that can be affected by broad-spectrum antibiotics. AI has already shown promise in speeding up phage engineering, as we reported last year when a group of researchers from Stanford University and the Arc Institute created AI-designed phages that targeted E. coli bacteria. The phages, designed using the genetic sequence of a well-studied natural E. coli phage, included several variants that outperformed their biological predecessor in laboratory tests. Similar to the Stanford work, which is referenced in Radical Numerics' write-up, the company used its own AI model to design bacteriophages, which it then tested against bacteria isolated from the antibiotic-resistant infection its patient was suffering from. “The cocktail containing Omnii-1-designed phage variants eliminated the patient's antibiotic-resistant isolate in vitro,” the company explained, so there’s at least a success on record there. “The investigational cocktail was subsequently administered to the patient under compassionate use.” Unfortunately, that’s where the trail of results ends, as Radical Numerics didn’t publish anything about the results of testing the phage in a human, citing the need to protect their privacy. The company also doesn’t want to give the impression that its AI phage therapy is generally safe or effective, noting that observations from a single patient don’t establish much of anything. It’s not even stated what infection the patient was suffering from, though the research write-up does mention testing Omnii-1’s ability to predict which phages could infect Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that can develop antibiotic resistance and cause infections in patients with burns and other wounds, as well as persistent lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients. The AI model “performed competitively” against a specialized model at predicting phage-host interactions, the research write-up notes. There’s nothing in the paper to suggest the patient was suffering from a Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. “This marks an important milestone in translating AI-designed biology from computational predictions and laboratory validation to clinical administration,” Radical Numerics said of its work. The treatment takes the technology beyond laboratory testing, even if it turns out not to fully eliminate the infection. Radical Numerics hopes its work will lead to a process for designing and building phages targeted to individual bacterial infections, and the need for alternatives is already pressing – antibiotic resistance is a growing global health threat, with drug-resistant infections already causing substantial mortality worldwide. Radical Numerics didn’t respond to questions for this story. ®
For more than a year, marshalled by animator Andy Bailey, more than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire three hours. 120,000 individually drawn pages. A couple of months ago, they released the first 11 minutes:
It’s pretty amazing. It doesn’t include the audio or music from the movie, but I bet you could mute the sound on this and simultaneously play the actual movie for the sound. Here’s an earlier sneak peek at some of the scenes:
The first clip I claimed was a pretty iconic scene from the beginning of the movie. I chose to render it in pencil as it’s night time and I felt black and white would be more dramatic. As I worked through the frames, I did worry that the subtle variances in shading would make the clip look disjointed, but I think it adds a cool movement to the scene. There is that rough, quirky imperfection to hand drawing. You can see the final result with comparison below (digitized and compiled by Andy).
Texas has shut down the web portal for its automated construction permit filing system and suspended construction permits of 17 data center projects. The change came after 404 Media reported that a group of Texans discovered the state had continued to issue construction permits related to data centers despite Governor Greg Abbott calling for a pause in September.
On Monday, the watchdog groups FracTracker Alliance and Public Citizen published reports detailing more than two dozen permits issued to Texas data center projects. On Tuesday, the website for STEERS – an application filing system for construction projects run by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) – returned a 404 error.
The TCEQ portal as it appeared on Wednesday afternoon.
By Wednesday, the site had this message on it: “TCEQ’s electronic filing application used for automatic authorizations has been temporarily shut down to ensure all applications are reviewed by agency staff to determine if they are related to data centers.”
Before TCEQ shut the portal down, 404 Media viewed 17 different permits related to data center projects and saw that they’d been moved from “active” to “suspended” in the TCEQ central registry.
“STEERS is a portal that TCEQ uses to rubber stamp construction approvals,” Sam Law, a researcher at FracTracker Alliance told 404 Media. “It seems like they forgot about it and the portal has been quietly issuing approvals since the governor’s order for a pause, including for OpenAI and Amazon this Monday and Tuesday.”
The 17 suspended permits are related to stormwater construction, an approval that allows construction companies to raise and level ground. It’s a key, and sometimes final, part of the approval process for any construction project in Texas.
“Now they’ve taken the unprecedented step of suspending 17 approvals and taking down the whole site as they switch to a more involved human review process,” Law said. “The irony is not lost on me. When fighting the AI data centers build out, it’s nice to have a clear example of how some work is better left to humans.”
Law said he reached out to TCEQ and didn’t hear anything from them. The commission also didn’t respond to 404 Media’s request for comment. “I am very concerned that since contractors are accustomed to this automated approval process, they might not be aware of the suspension and continuing construction at some of the largest hyperscale facilities in Texas,” Law said.
Ten years have passed since Taylor Swift performed her only show of 2016 in front of 80,000 Formula 1 fans at the United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas.
